Overcast and portentous, Brian Case’s Spirit Design lurches. Rolling in like an oversaturated cloud formation swallowing anything from charred synths and shivering sub-bass into its its blackened atmospherics, Case’s latest full-length for Hands in the Dark threatens to collapse under its own yawning depth and smothering weight. In this totalizing sound environment, Case evacuates melody, structure, and legibility, leaving only the cold and brutal sparseness of his voice and devastating instrumentation to populate the noxious territory. But even Case’s voice succumbs to this airless sound sludge: on “Shipbuilding,” for example, Case’s intelligible—if ominous—words bleed into incomprehensibility as the song’s suffocating logics ooze out of control. On later tracks, like “Control” and “Say Your Name,” his voice can only eke out the titles of the songs themselves in an arcane incantation that condenses speech and meaning into noise, into effacing squalor. On Spirit Design, Case unleashes a singularly enveloping haze of sound and mood so thick it’s impossible to hear your own breath. Like other forms asphyxiation, it’s orgastic.
Spirit Design is available August 25 on Hands in the Dark.